Andrew Clavin exposes ESPN’s purge of conservative voices as a symptom of leftist ideological dominance, from racially segregated Oberlin housing to Berkeley’s free-speech riots, where dissent risks grades or violence. He frames Silence of the Lambs as a warning: Hannibal Lecter’s materialism mirrors modern transgender theory’s reduction of identity to "shape," while Clarice’s lamb imagery ties evil to systemic oppression. The episode ties academic coercion, Hollywood narratives, and political censorship into a broader war on conservative principles, urging resistance against what he calls "Soviet-style" campus indoctrination. [Automatically generated summary]
The sports channel's audience reacted by turning off his television in disgust.
Reports say the firings include over 100 on-air personalities, dozens of behind-the-scenes staff, and several people who just happened to be walking by the studio.
ESPN will also be changing its slogan from the worldwide leader in sports to offices for rent plus memorabilia cheap.
The firings come after many viewers complained that the sports channel had become overly political and left-wing.
For some reason, the audience didn't seem to enjoy having their political opinions denigrated by a group of men who never managed to do anything more with their lives than comment on other people's sporting achievements.
But ESPN president Skip Dunderhead said politics had nothing to do with the drop-in audience.
He told reporters, quote, I'm sure our viewers love to have us explain to them how ignorant and racist they are.
I'm sure they wouldn't want us to just give them the game scores and then shut the hell up.
That wouldn't make any sense, unquote.
ESPN commentator Jockey Clueless, host of the weekly show Basketball Roundup Donald Trump Stinks, says he can't understand why his audience plummeted to 17 people after the episode entitled LeBron James discusses how much I think Donald Trump stinks.
Jockey issued a statement saying, quote, it has been a deep honor to serve the audience of ESPN by telling them what a crappy president they elected because they're such a bunch of ill-educated slobs.
If I've brought even a little joy into the lives of the fascist Trump-sucking scum who used to watch this channel, I feel my time here has been well spent, unquote.
Another ESPN show host, Chip Hateful, says he was totally taken aback by his firing and by the cancellation of his football show, Hey Football Players, Stop Praying There Is No God.
In a farewell statement at the end of the final episode, Chip said, quote, I know many of you appreciated what a valuable service I provided by debunking your deeply held faith with the light of my superior wisdom.
Movement Watches Success00:03:05
I'm sure it was obvious to you that a man who can recite the entire roster of the 1957 Cleveland Browns should be your go-to guide on the big theological questions.
Every week, I try to bring you at least one more example of how praying doesn't change anything.
After all, if there really were a God, then he would have given me talent and athleticism instead of making me a 5'7 nebish who never got picked for the team in school unless the teacher said everyone had to play.
⁇ Unquote.
I know we here at the Andrew Clavin Show will sorely miss having our beliefs ridiculed by the ESPN lineup, and we can only say to all those who were fired, we're sorry to see you go and stay out.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey, life is tickety blue.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray.
Want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
I'm falling asleep here.
I just got off a plane from Cleveland, Ohio.
I was speaking at Oberlin College, the heart of liberal darkness.
And I just, I came literally, I came from the plane.
I had to wake up at four in the morning, got on the plane, did the show prep on the plane, and I'm driving here, so I'm eating on the air.
I'll be eating little crackers.
I haven't had anything to eat.
And luckily, though, I do have something good to tell you about movement watches.
Now, this is called Movement, but it's MVMT.
They just left out the letters, but they may turn up in the wash.
I'm not sure.
MVMT Movement Watches.
This is created by two guys who are just like me.
They wanted, they liked fine watches.
I love fine watches.
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But something in me, and you know, there's things I'm not cheap about, but something in me just does not want to plunk down a million bucks for a fancy watch.
So movement watches, they created, they realized that online they could bring down their prices, sell fashionable, beautiful watches that really work well, and they have already sold, they've only just gotten started, and they've already sold over a million watches to customers in 160-plus countries around the world.
Go on their website, really, check it out, movementwatches.com, and you'll see.
It's easy to use.
The watches start at $95.
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At a department store, this stuff would cost you $400 to $500.
And these start at $95.
They have really nice, classic, smooth designs, a little bit like maybe Movado or something like that.
Over a million watches sold in over 160 copies.
And you can get 15% off today with free shipping and free returns by going to mvmtwatches.com slash Andrew.
Put in my name so they know we sent you and they will continue to advertise with us and we'll continue to be here.
This watch has a really clean design.
It's been getting compliments ever since I put it on everywhere I go.
Movement Watches Promo00:13:55
My wife loves it.
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Now is the time to step up your watch game at mvmtwatches.com slash Andrew for 15% off today.
Join the movement.
All right, I have got to talk about this Oberlin experience.
I really do.
I mean, because Shapiro does this all the time, and the reason I don't do it, I get a lot of offers to speak, but I'm so absent-minded that they come in and I'm writing all the time and I just don't answer them, you know.
So the other day, this is true.
I said to Shapiro, what do I do about this?
Because you're always talking.
I feel like I owe it to people to kind of go out.
And he said, you know, we have this lady here who runs, basically runs the Daily Wire, Candace Brecca.
Basically, we would all just sink into the sea without Candace.
So he said, you know, ask Candice and she will take care of your speaking engagements.
So this was the first one I got to her.
And it went, you know, I went off to Oberlin, not even thinking, seriously, not even thinking there would be any trouble because I'm such a lovely person.
Who would bother me?
So, you know, now this is nothing.
Obviously, this is nothing like what's happening at Berkeley.
The situation at Berkeley is getting worse and worse.
Ann Coulter had to cancel her show because they were threatening violence and the police, the campus police, and this is really shameful.
The campus police would said they just wouldn't do anything about it unless a life was in danger.
They were just not going to stop these rioters, these thugs, this mob from shutting down free speech.
Ann had been invited.
And finally, YAF, the Young American Foundation, we love them, but they just felt that the safety of people was more important than backing Ann's play.
Ann was going to show up anywhere.
They pulled out.
Ann's angry about it, but she left.
But now, Gavin McLeod, who has begun full alt-right, basically, he runs this group called the Proud Boys.
Not a name I like very much, Proud Boy.
And they call themselves Western chauvinists, okay?
Western chauvinists.
So we won't parse that.
We'll just take them at their word.
They're Western chauvinists.
They believe in the West.
I believe in the West.
And they're saying that they're going to go with a contingent of large Western chauvinists, I guess, and they're going to face down the left-wing Gavin, isn't that what I call it?
What do I call him?
Oh, McLeod, sorry, Gavin McGuinness.
All right, you know, I'm not giving him, I'm not giving credit for leading this movement of rioting alt-right people.
Gavin McGinnis, sorry about that.
Thank you, J.A.
This is, you know, I just got off the plane.
I'm trying to use my words.
So Gavin's going out there, and he's going to lead basically another one of these charges for the alt-right.
And so they're looking forward to violence with the alt-left.
And it's getting worse and worse.
This was nothing like that.
I mean, this is a very beautiful little college in the middle of Ohio.
But a cloud, a pall of political correctness and left-wingism has settled over this thing like the fog in a horror movie, okay?
So you meet, I go there and I'm hosted by the Oberlin Republicans and Conservatives and Libertarian Club.
And these guys are hilarious.
I mean, they just have this deadpan troll-like sense of, they're like the new millennial trolls.
They have this absolutely deadpan sense of humor.
They just love to set people off.
They called it the Donald Trump series of lectures.
I was like, has Donald Trump ever been to a lecture?
Why does he get a lecture?
But they just do it to make people crazy because everybody else in the college, except these 15 or 20 people, how many ever they are, were sobbing when Donald Trump won.
I mean, this entire college went nuts.
And so they put up 300 posters of my adorable face all over campus.
Every single one was torn down.
Everyone was torn down.
Yes.
And they said they would climb up on chairs to put them, so make them hard to reach, and people would go up and get them.
They were defaced.
They were, you know, people put lipstick, drew lipstick on them and marked them as transphobic, which who knew, you know.
I'm a little afraid of spiders, but I don't have anything about the transsexual people.
And they were all torn down.
And first, I have to mention that.
I just have to tell you this.
They took me on a tour of the campus.
And the campus has racially segregated housing.
It has a place called A-House.
The A is for Africa.
It is where the black people are housed.
I mean, Martin Luther King would weep, okay?
I wanted to say to these kids, I mean, to me, these people look like kids, right?
I mean, like, I'm an ancient figure at this point.
I'm the ancient mariner at this point.
So, like, I'm looking at these guys.
I just thought, you know, in my generation, people of all colors walked unarmed into phalanxes of southern racist police holding weapons on them and hoses and running attack dogs on them to get rid of this crap.
And you bring it back because you can't associate with them.
You know, one of the guys in the club was a black guy, and he said he had been banned from A-House.
So this is, you know, and every bathroom is proudly, you know, all genders and every bathroom gender neutral or whatever.
So I haven't been to the bathroom for three days.
And like, you know, and so it is this whole thing.
You just know what you're dealing with.
And the people using the room before me were in training to make sure that everybody could get an abortion, you know, make sure that access to abortion was right.
So those are the people using the room before me.
And I came in and I didn't, I seriously, I was joking about it a little bit, but I seriously wasn't expecting anything.
There were no protests or anything like that.
The minute I came in, I could see that there were going to be people who were not there because they agreed with me, which was absolutely fine.
I was happy for that to happen.
But there were people there who were there to heckle me.
And there were especially, I don't know, maybe two, there was definitely two, there were maybe three or four hecklers, people who actually shouted out while I was speaking.
But there were two people there who were really kind of trying to start trouble.
Like one was this woman who would constantly laugh out loud, this big hysterical laugh, until one of the audience members turned around and told her to shut up.
And the other guy was this guy with some kind of, I mean, he was obviously gay and had some kind of gender thing going on.
He was weirdly dressed.
And he would just shout out from time to time.
And, you know, I wanted to say to him, you know, you think people don't like you because you're gay, but they probably don't like you because you're an ill-bred lout, you know.
But, you know, I didn't do that.
I'm not, you know, I'm not Shapiro.
I'm not out to attack people.
I actually am out to talk to people and try and convince people.
Our makeup lady Taylor Payne today joked that I'm what Shapiro would look like if he ate a Snickers bar.
So all I would do is I would say to them repeatedly whenever they would stop, you know, I hear you're angry, but I'm here to talk to you, you know, and I'm going to give this speech.
And then afterwards, I will answer any question you have.
I will debate you.
I'll talk to you at any length you want.
And here's the interesting thing, okay?
There were a lot of lovely left-wing kids, students in this place, who waited their turn, listened to what I had to say, and then got up and asked me questions.
They asked me questions at the Q ⁇ A.
They stood after the show and they lined up and asked me questions, you know, face to face.
They were absolutely, you know, well-mannered, charming, intelligent young people.
All the hecklers, the minute I stopped talking, ran for the door.
They all ran out.
Not one of them had the guts.
Not one of them had the guts to stay and ask a question and engage in actual debate.
And a couple of thoughts come to me.
One is, I seriously believe that some of these people who do this stuff are mentally ill.
I'm not going to say anything about all transgender people.
I know of transgender people who seem to live pretty well-regulated lives.
But this is a painful situation to be in, and it's a mental, it's a psychiatric situation.
It's not a political situation.
Your problem, your misery, your unhappiness if you're transgender is not being caused.
It may be exacerbated if people are bullying and mean to you, but it's not being caused by a world of prejudice against transgender people.
It's being caused by stress inside yourself.
And for the administration of a school and the adults in a school and people who should know better in a school, to teach these kids that their problem is political rather than personal is an act of cruelty.
I know they think they're being kind by saying, oh, you're beautiful, you're perfect just the way they are, just the way you are.
It's just the world that's prejudiced against you.
But think about it for a minute.
They know they have a struggle inside themselves.
They know that that's not going to go away.
You teach them that all they need to do is make every single person in the world nice to them and everything will be fine.
Nothing will ever be fine for them because no one ever gets that.
None of us get that, right?
I mean, I wake up every day and people are screaming at me and saying nasty things about me.
You know, this is the way the world is.
There's no guarantee that people will like you.
And if you teach people that they're never going to be happy until the world likes them, and they start to turn outward for a fix when they need to turn inward for a fix, that's an act of cruelty.
And let me tell you something else that's an act of cruelty.
I just want to talk about the, because I don't want to talk about the kids.
I don't want to run down these young people.
It's an act of cruelty to envelop these young people in propaganda.
And especially, I wanted to, I talked to the conservative kids about this.
And I said, what do you do?
Because, you know, a lot of them, they're very bright, and a lot of them want to go on to be lawyers and doctors.
And so they're really in, if they're undergrads, they're really looking forward to going into graduate school, so they need good grades.
I said, what do you do with these people who, these professors who give you bad grades when you disagree with them?
And a lot of them said, well, we keep our heads down.
We echo back what they told us.
And we just get our grade and we go home because otherwise they'll fail us.
Now think about that for a minute.
A man is what he says to a large degree.
And I'm not, you know, I've been a loudmouth all my life.
I mean, I went to school and I never took anything from anybody, even in high school.
I would never have echoed back somebody's point of view.
And I got bad grades a lot of times because of it.
I got all kinds of, I got into all kinds of trouble.
But what a horrible, mean, nasty, low, dishonest thing it is to do to a young American person, a young person who should be free, to force him to echo back your political opinion or fail.
Think about it.
Think about it.
That's like, that's like living under tyranny, you know?
That's like living in the Soviet Union where you have to have this inner life that is telling you the truth because you don't want to lose yourself completely while your outer life is continually a mess.
I got to stop here and say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But come over to thedailywire.com.
You missed having your questions in the mailbag yesterday, but you could have had you subscribed for just a lousy eight bucks a month.
And do it.
What are we giving away?
We're giving away the Arroyo.
Come on.
You can have the DVD of Arroyo if you subscribe for a year.
And you can ask questions in the mailbag and you get Shapiro too.
So think about that.
That's a very cruel thing to do.
You know, it's a very cruel thing to say to young people, and I would offer that it's especially cruel to say to men, you know, you have to lie to get through here.
You have to toe my political line.
That's cruel.
I mean, never mind, never mind that you're wrong as a leftist.
Forget about that for a minute.
But it's cruel.
It's a cruel thing to do to young people.
The other thing is this.
I mean, what my talk was about was about the way the left controls the flow of information.
It controls Hollywood, it controls the news media, it controls the academy, and it uses that control to not only to only tell one side of the story, but to silence our side of the story, as we see at Berkeley, as we've seen at Pomona, as we see just about everywhere where people turn up and try to talk and are shouted down.
So here's the thing about young people, and you only know this if you've been, one, if you're a scientist, because I just noticed it as a parent, but then I found out that it was actually good science, is that young people's brains don't fully form until they're 25.
And I noticed this because my kids happen to be extraordinarily bright.
I mean, you've met, I don't know if you've met my daughter, but you've met my son, Spencer.
Yeah, they don't believe my daughter actually exists because she doesn't come out here as often.
But they're both extraordinarily bright.
But when you talk to them until they got to be 25, when they reach 25, I suddenly thought, ah, now they're making all the connections.
It's not that they had no insights before.
It's not that they had no education before.
It's not that they couldn't reason and talk.
But they did not have the full power of an adult brain to reason with.
And at 25, it like kicks in like that.
And suddenly you think, oh, now these kids are brighter than I am.
And it's great.
And if you look it up, it will tell you the brain doesn't fully develop until you're 25.
That's just the way it is.
To take these kids at the moment when their brains are still forming.
I know that every college kid thinks he's an adult, and he is an adult in many ways.
But no, he is an adult in many ways.
But in this way, your brain is still forming.
To take these kids and fill them with a very specific lie.
The lie is not leftism.
Leftism is a mistake and an error, and I think it ends up in causing evil.
But the lie is that thoughts and words and actions are all the same thing, okay?
Filling Young Minds With Lies00:15:16
I mean, in Chechnya, did I talk about this yesterday?
In Chechnya, they have now, this is the Muslim Republic within Russia, okay?
The Chechen Republic.
They have now opened the first concentration camp for homosexuals since Hitler days.
I mean, Hitler used to round up the gays, even though there were a lot of gays in his administration.
He used to round up the gays and throw them in with the Jews.
You know, he mostly wanted to kill the Jews, but he would throw on the gays with them.
In Chechnya, they have now opened up the first concentration camp since then for gay people.
Gay people are carted in, thrown into stuffed rooms, they're hit with electric shocks, they're starved, they're beaten to death, okay?
That's not the same thing as having to eat a Chick-fil-A or not having not to eat a Chick-fil-A.
That's not the same thing as there being a Chick-fil-A in your neighborhood.
And what this philosophy does is it tells people that they are in a situation requiring the courage to shout down Chick-fil-A because that's essentially on the spectrum of a Chechnyan concentration camp.
They're telling women, you know, women in America are not oppressed.
Nobody in America is oppressed as anybody has understood the word oppression since the history of mankind began, okay?
In Dubai, a woman who reported, a British woman who reported being gang raped, was arrested for having illegal sex, okay?
You're not oppressed in America.
You're not oppressed in America if, you know, they won't pay for your birth control.
That's not oppression.
You know, that may be an irritation.
It may cost you a couple of bucks, but that is not what oppression looks like.
And by telling people, by trying to get people outraged at their state, by telling them that words are the same as actions, they put them in this state of victimhood and oppression.
And they're always on the lookout for a fight.
And they can't let anybody else speak.
They have to silence everybody else because the words are the same as the oppression.
Some of the questions that I was asked, and these were lovely people, they really were.
They were asking politely.
They were listening to answers.
They were engaging with me and all this stuff.
But they would ask questions like, well, because you say you want people to be free, and I do want people to be free, why are you against abortion?
And I would explain that, you know, I want women to be able to have abortion, but I don't want them to be able to kill a child.
If I want to be free from my marriage, I can't kill my wife.
You can't earn your freedom by killing the people who are in your way.
And the child, the unborn baby, is a person.
It's a completely complete set of DNA that, if allowed to live, will become a full human being.
And one of these people said to me, well, isn't that the same as a florist refusing to cater a gay wedding?
And, you know, I said, well, let's think about that for a minute.
Is it the same?
You know, it's like, if I don't cater to your wedding, is that the same as my killing you?
I mean, is that the same?
But that's the logic that they have set up.
It's not these kids' fault.
I mean, these kids want their lives to have meaning.
They want to do right in the world.
They want to be brave.
They want to stand up for what's good.
All of that I support.
And they have been sold a bill of goods.
And I think that that's a cruel thing to do.
It's a cruel thing to do.
You will never find meaning.
You will never find meaning shutting down Chick-fil-A because the CEO of Chick-fil-A doesn't approve of gay marriage or even boycotting Chick-fil-A when people are being carted off in this very world that we're living in right now into concentration camps and killed for the same for being gay.
I mean, it's just a cruel thing to do.
And I was just struck by the cruelty of the left, the oppression of the left.
It's not, it is not, you know, it's the kids who wind up messed up and running through the streets and shouting stupid things.
So Steve Crowder goes out and makes funny videos about him and all this stuff.
And by the way, all these conservatives, they love Steve Crowder.
I texted him.
I said, boy, oh boy, they just love you, buddy.
But all those kids that he's making funny videos about because they say these silly things, they're the victims.
They are the victims of these professors.
These professors are grown-up people who have taken their philosophy into a college where they're never tested.
Their ideas are never tested against reality.
They get tenure so they can never be fired and they sit around whining about free speech.
They are some of the most privileged people in this country.
And to do what they do to these kids is obscene.
To tell a black kid who comes to school who ought to, when you come to college, your life ought to be opening up.
It ought to be opening up.
You ought to be meeting people like you've never met before, different people, finding out that, hey, you know, that white guy in the button-down shirt is not so different from the black guy in the pullover.
You know, you guys have a lot in common.
You know, there's stuff to talk about.
There's an experience to have that you can remember for the rest of your life.
You know, you say, gee, I came from this neighborhood where everybody was the same.
Everybody was Jewish, everybody was Italian.
And I came into this college, and suddenly I was meeting all these different people, and we had a lot of things in common, a lot of things different.
It was fascinating.
It was like traveling the world while just being, and they put you in a dorm for people of your race.
That's a sin.
That is a sin, you know.
And what they're doing to kids in these colleges, that is just a terrible thing to do.
And again, I want to emphasize this: that the kids who came and talked to me who were leftist and they discussed their opinion and they talked about their feeling when I would use words when I would talk about Islamic terrorism.
And I'm very blunt.
I don't pull any punches.
I just say what I have to say.
I don't mean to be mean, but I just want to say what is in front of my eyes.
You know, and they talked about their feelings about that.
You know, you can have that conversation.
You can have that conversation, but the colleges have set it up so the conversation can't be had because they are protecting themselves.
They're protecting their bad philosophy that they've taken into this college and used to shape these kids.
And it's not shaping them.
It's not allowing them to shape themselves.
I mean, look, I'm a father.
I know this.
The way you shape kids is by letting them shape themselves.
You know, you let them shape themselves, except you keep them from falling off the top of the building.
You keep them from driving their car into a telephone pole.
You let them do this.
This is brainwashing.
It is brainwashing.
It is a small, sick, stupid little philosophy.
This, I can't remember what it's called, the intersectionality.
Is that what they call it?
Intersectionality.
This is a stupid philosophy that teaches you you are oppressed.
If you are within the sound of my voice in the United States of America, you are not oppressed.
You are not.
You are one of the chosen few.
You have won the lottery of life.
Congratulations.
Put a big smile on your face.
Be as nice as you can to the person next to you and go ahead and make something out of yourself.
Become something better than you started out to be.
Make your parents proud of you.
Make your friends proud of you.
Don't sit around and say you're oppressed because it's just not true.
It is true that there's injustice in the world.
It's true that there are people who dislike you.
It is true that there are people who are prejudiced against you.
That will never go away.
And anybody who tells you that you have got to solve that problem before you can be happy is telling you to have an unhappy life, is chaining you to an unhappy life.
And the last thing I want to say about this, and then I will move on to some cultural stuff I want to talk about, but the last thing I want to say about this is I don't want to tell anybody to take risks they're not ready to take.
But this country right this minute requires everyday heroes.
I don't really think it requires guys like Gavin to go out and start riots.
You know, maybe I'm missing the point here.
But it needs everyday heroes to say what they have to say.
We're the good guys, the people who believe in the Constitution.
Freedom is the only original political thought anybody has ever had.
Socialism has been around at least since Pharaoh, okay?
The idea that the government should control you, the idea that people should control your thoughts and your mind and your actions, that has been around since the first man picked up the first club, okay?
But the ideas in the Constitution, those are new.
And we need everyday heroes to stand up for them, even in conversation, politely.
It's not like preaching.
It's not like grabbing the guy sitting in the plane next to you and saying, have you been saved yet, brother?
It's not like saying that, but it's just when don't let people make assumptions about what you believe.
And, you know, if that costs you sometimes a little less of a grade, you know, if it means for a guy like me that I don't get the screenplay to sell the screenplay I want to sell.
You know, I just think like, you know, Jesus was crucified for telling the truth.
If your problem is you get a B minus, you're playing with the house's money.
You're still ahead of the game, you know.
And I really, because I really think what they're doing to these young people is an act of cruelty.
It's an act of oppression.
That's the only act of oppression taking place in America today.
All right.
I got to talk about Jonathan Demi before I go away and go get about five hours of sleep.
You know, Jonathan Demi died, and he had the strangest career.
When you look at his filmography, he started out making these exploitation films like about women in prison, you know, it's like cold bars, passionate heat behind cold bars.
And then he went on to make kind of left-wing, a lot of left-wing slanted pictures.
He made Philadelphia, where that was a big thing during the AIDS crisis, where Tom Hanks has AIDS, and that was a big kind of milestone political movie and all this.
And of course, his famous film, his one real classic of a film, is Silence of the Lambs.
And the reason I want to talk about Silence of the Lambs is Silence of the Lambs, based on the novel by Thomas Harris, is one of my favorite thrillers of my that was written during my lifetime.
I don't like the other books, but it's a very, very purposeful, meaningful book.
And it's about transgenderism, and it is about a flaw in the idea of transgenderism.
Now, there are going to be some spoilers here because it's an old movie and it's sort of an Oscar winner, and I figure most people have seen it.
You guys have seen Silence of the Lambs.
Yeah, most people have seen Silence of the Lambs, but turn it off if you don't want to hear anything.
I won't give away the ending, but there will be spoilers.
So, Silence of the Lambs, you remember, is about Clarice Starling.
Clarice Starling means clear, bright star, right?
She's the clear, bright star, and she comes in to talk about Hannibal Lecter.
And Hannibal Lecter is, Hannibal was the conqueror of the West, right?
He was the guy who came over to conquer the West, and Lecter means reader.
So he is the intellectual who is conquering the West.
You know, he is the college professor who has come to tell you that you are made of meat because he is a cannibal.
He eats people.
So he is telling people that they are empty vessels.
They are nothing.
They are just meat.
That's why he's in prison.
And of course, it's that wonderful, wonderful performance by, what's his name?
I'm sorry, I have no sleep.
What?
Anthony Hopkins, of course.
I'm sorry, I'm working on no sleep whatsoever.
But, you know, it's that wonderful performance by Anthony Hopkins.
Let's take a look at it for a minute.
The Hopkins cut is Hannibal Lecter.
What did you do?
I went downstairs.
Outside.
That's not the one I wanted.
It's the one.
Yeah, that's the Hannibal one.
First principles, Clarice.
Simplicity.
Read Marcus Aurelius.
Of each particular thing, ask, what is it in itself?
What is its nature?
What does he do, this man you seek?
He kills women.
No, that is incidental.
What is the first and principal thing he does?
What needs does he serve by killing?
Anger.
Social acceptance.
Sexual frustration.
No.
He covets.
That is his nature.
And how do we begin to covet, Clarice?
Do we seek out things to covet?
Make an effort to answer now.
No.
We just.
Now we begin by coveting what we see every day.
Don't you feel eyes moving of your body, Clarice?
And don't your eyes seek out the things you want?
So he's.
That's a great performance.
Such a good performance.
So here's the man who is an intellectual.
He's a psychiatrist, right?
This is very important.
I mean, Harris really means this.
In the book, in the novel, he talks about the fact that after the case is closed, Clarice Starling is an FBI agent looking for a serial killer named Buffalo Bill, and she goes to the serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, for advice on how to find him.
And he's a psychiatrist.
And in the book, Harrison, the only authorial comment in the book, points out that no one ever uses the word evil about Buffalo Bill because we are lost in this psychiatric babble that takes out the moral component of everything.
And that is what Lecter does because with his psychiatry, which is essentially a materialist profession, it's a materialist idea.
It was meant to be.
It's not always.
It was meant to be.
He has reduced people to meat.
He eats people.
That's what he does.
He has reduced them to meat.
He has them with a fine wine.
And here is Buffalo Bill, the killer.
Now, Buffalo Bill, the killer, is capturing women, puts them in an oubliette, a pit, and he basically skins them because he wants to dress up in a woman suit.
He wants to be as beautiful as a woman.
That's what Lecter is talking about when he says coveting people.
Now, the flaw in this, of course, is the flaw of transgenderism.
It is the idea that a woman is a shape.
A woman is just a series of things that you can acquire instead of being an inner spiritual state.
That you are a woman in some essential way that has nothing to do with these things, or at least is expressed by your body.
It's expressed by your body, but is not necessarily formed by your body.
And listen to the way Buffalo Bill talks to his victim in this oubliette in this rather terrifying scene.
It rubs the lotion on its skin.
It does this whenever it's told.
Mr. My Family, okay, cash.
Whatever ransom you're asking for, they'll pay it.
It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
If she will, precious should look at the hose.
Okay, Mr., if you let me go, I won't press charges, I promise.
See, my mom is a real important woman.
I guess you already know that.
Now it places the lotion in the basket.
Please. Please.
A man who thinks he can turn himself into a woman by dressing himself like a woman by putting on a woman's skin refers to the woman as it, right?
She is just a thing.
It does what it's told.
She's just a thing to him, and he can become that thing by taking what that thing has and putting it on as a costume, right?
Silence of the Lambs Creaks00:07:32
And then you have Clarice Starling, whose biggest trauma in her life was watching, as a little girl, was watching lambs being slaughtered.
She is explaining this to the psychiatrist Lecter.
What did you do?
I went downstairs, outside.
I crept up into the barn.
I was so scared to look inside, but I hit.
What did you see, Clarice?
What did you see?
Lambs.
They were screaming.
They were slaughtering the spring lambs?
They were screaming.
And you ran away?
No.
First I tried to free them.
I opened the gate to their pen, but they wouldn't run.
They just stood there, confused.
They wouldn't run.
But you could, and you did, didn't you?
Yes.
I took one lamb and I ran away as fast as I could.
Where were you going, Chloe?
I don't know.
I didn't have any food, any water, and it was very cold.
Very cold.
I thought, I thought if I could save just one, but it was so heavy.
So the lambs are being slaughtered, and we all know that the lamb is the lamb of God as the Agnes Day.
It's a reference to the innocent victims who are represented by Jesus Christ.
I'm not saying this is a Christian novel or a Christian film.
I'm just saying that the symbolism, he could have used anything, could have used a little puppy being killed by a car, but instead he uses the lamb and she tries to save the lamb.
And that becomes the mission of her life.
That's why she is an FBI agent, because she is trying to get the lambs to stop screaming.
She was looking for the silence of the lambs.
And the silence of the lambs has another meaning as well, in that it's also what's going on in this movie.
It's also the material world, that Hannibal Lecter, who is the intellectual set, he is an intellectual movement.
He represents an intellectual movement.
Obviously, he is its extreme manifestation in this cannibal serial killer, but he is the manifestation of this materialist idea of humankind as meat, as a chemistry set, as someone whose soul is an illusion, whose personality is an illusion.
We were talking about that a little bit before.
And so this is what this film is about.
It's a battle between what is good.
It's a battle between good and evil, but the good and evil are very well defined.
The person who believes in saving the innocent victim because of the eternal worth of that victim, who is fighting this battle in a fallen world where the lambs are going to die, and Hannibal Lecter, who has transformed man through his intellectual capacities, but he has done it by theory.
He has done it by theory, just like the professors in the colleges.
He is by theory, he has transformed people into material.
And Buffalo Bill, who is his protégé, who is his creation, a person who thinks that gender is a matter of this kind of weird physical transformation that you can make as opposed to being, as opposed to having a soul that is immutable in what you are.
So Jonathan Demi, rest in peace.
It's a terrific movie.
I think it's a better book.
I don't mean to undermine them, but I thought I loved the book.
I read the book first.
I've noticed that people who see the movie first like the movie better and people who read the book first like the book better.
So maybe it's just a question of which you see first.
Which brings me, before I pitch forward and collapse onto the microphone, it brings me to stuff I like.
I've been doing kind of obscure crime films that you've never heard of.
Although I noticed, you know, I don't know if Greg Gutfeld is listening to the show.
I hope he is, if he is.
How you doing, Greg?
But he was tweeting about The Vanishing yesterday.
You know, we did the Van.
Yeah, we did The Vanishing on the show.
Was it yesterday we did Monday?
We did The Vanishing on the show.
Great film.
You've got to watch the foreign version, the French-Dutch version, not the English version.
But a terrific, terrific movie.
And this is a film you've never seen, you've never heard of.
It's very old.
It's a little creaky, you know, it's got some plot points.
But if you like Silence of the Lambs and you want to see some of the people who did this before Silence of the Lambs, who did some of this before, there is a film that I have always loved called, in America, it's called The Hidden Room.
It's a 1949 film.
In Britain, where it was made is called Obsession, I believe.
There are many, many films called Obsession, but this is called The Hidden Room.
And it stars Robert Newton, who's a largely forgotten actor, but he was a very good British actor.
And he is a very sophisticated guy who comes home and finds his wife with another man.
And this is the scene where he walks in on them.
His wife is basically having an affair, and he hides in a corner and listens to them having an affair, and then he walks in on them.
Why did you come back, darling?
I changed my mind.
What did I want with a holiday, I asked myself.
A holiday away from my beautiful wife.
Your drink, my dear.
And here's yours, Bill.
Thanks.
And here's mine.
Do sit down, please.
Fellow, over there on the sofa.
That's the idea.
Well, good luck.
Cheers.
By the way, Margaret couldn't go to the concert after all, so.
So you went.
Yes.
Bill happened to phone about something or other just after Margaret rang off, so I got me a free seat.
Did you enjoy the concert?
Oh, swell.
He played everything I love.
Many there?
Overflowing, I'd say.
I'm standing at the back.
Remarkable.
So you saw the house full to overflowing?
Sure.
What of it?
Really remarkable.
And you, my dear, heard your favorite music played, interpreted by Rakovsky.
Some of it?
Yes.
Really remarkable imagination.
Such is the power of the master musician, even if he isn't there.
You see, there was no concert tonight, it was cancelled.
Rakowski was taken to a nursing home half an hour before the performance was due to begin.
I, too, am sitting here wondering what I'd say in either of your position.
No, I can't think of anything else.
That's such a well-written scene.
Anyway, the husband decides he's going to take his revenge on the lover, and he decides that he's going to do it so it is a perfect crime.
And if you have seen Silence of the Lambs, you will recognize some of the devices.
I'm not saying that Harris took it.
I'm just saying that these things kind of develop through the genre.
It's a wonderful old film, and only the British really have the touch for taking the ordinary killer and turning him into the hero of a film.
Like, Americans don't do that so much.
Simon Brett did it in Shock to the System, and I wrote the film for that, which is also a great British.
You know, great that a British guy was in it because they just do it so well.
The Hidden Room, 1949, directed by Edward Dimitrik, one of the Hollywood 10.
He was one of the people jailed for standing up to the House on Americans Activity Committee.
British Touch in Horror00:00:25
All right.
I made it.
I made it through the show.
And so I didn't say one.
I didn't lose my language at any point.
That's what happens to me when I get really, really tired.
Suddenly, the words just disappear.
All right, but I will be back tomorrow with some sleep.
The Clavin Week continues into Friday for joy, and joy is heard throughout the land.